United Pilot Pleads Guilty to Running Prostitution Ring

The United Airlines pilot arrested in 2015 on charges that he was the head of a major Houston area prostitution ring has received probation after admitting his role in the criminal operation.

The United Airlines pilot arrested on charges of running a major prostitution network was sentenced to five years of probation on Thursday. Bruce Wayne Wallis, who has since left his job at the airline, admitted to using six apartment buildings in the Houston area as makeshift brothels. The 51-year-old escaped jail time after entering a guilty plea in a Texas courtroom.

Wallis was accused, not only of collecting as much as $400 per week from dozens of women who worked his brothels, but police say he actively recruited women into the sex trade and initiated new prostitutes into the organization by having sex with them. Many of the woman discovered working within Wallis’s network of brothels were identified as Russian nationals in local media reports.

“It’s the largest operation that I’ve ever worked on,” Assistant Harris County District Attorney Lester Blizzard said of the sting that led to the pilot’s arrest. Blizzard described the criminal enterprise he believed to be led by Captain Wallis as “massive.”

In exchange for a guilty plea, prosecutors agreed not to ask for more than seven years behind bars for the disgraced former airline pilot. Blizzard, however, told reportersthat he had hoped the judge would sentence the admitted sex trafficker to jail time.

“The judge did a thorough review and determined that probation was appropriate in this case,” he told the Houston Chronicleon Thursday. “I asked for penitentiary time.”

There is still some question of whether or not Wallis’s pilot credentials are in jeopardy. Although he is no longer employed by United Airlines, the former captain operates a private flight school. Prosecutors say the school, Eastex Aero, was at one time used by Wallis to fraudulently legitimize the employment records of the sex workers he recruited.